[FrontPageMag]: Nobody Believes All Women

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism

After Christine Blasey Ford’s confused testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Bumble took out full page ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in its trademark black, white and yellow, “Believe Women”.

Probably not a good idea with a dating app accused by some users of fooling them with fake profiles.  

Nobody believes all women. The Democrats certainly don’t. Just ask the two women who accused Keith Ellison, the DNC’s number two, of domestic abuse. A Minnesota poll showed that 42% of Republicans believed Ellison’s latest accuser, while only 5% of Democrats did. 71% of Minnesota Democrats didn’t think Al Franken should resign even when the line of accusers stretched out the door and then some.

Democrats are more likely to believe female accusers in the abstract, not when they have political skin in the game. That’s why fewer Democrats were willing to believe the allegations against Al Franken than against Bill Clinton, even though there were far more Franken witnesses and even a photo. Bill Clinton was yesterday’s news, while Franken, like Ellison, was a current progressive champion.

The willingness of more Democrats to believe Bill Clinton’s accusers isn’t evolution, it’s hypocrisy.

Democrats covered for Bill Clinton as long as the Clintons were a viable political dynasty. Only when Hillary went down in flames, and Bill Clinton seemed to spend most of his time playing with balloons, was it safe to start believing the same women they had been ridiculing and demeaning all these years.

And maybe when Keith Ellison retires to practice corporate law or plant bombs in synagogues, the Democrats will finally come around to believing the women who have accused him of abusing them.

Local Democrats are also less likely to believe the women accusing their own politicians than national Democrats are. The left supports #BelieveAllWomen in the abstract, but not when it hits home.

Lena Dunham will join various celebs protesting Brett Kavanaugh.

In August of last year, Dunham insisted that women never lie about rape. A few months later, when one of her male friends was accused of sexual assault, she decided that maybe they did. “While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story,” a statement co-written by Dunham read, “sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.”

Believe all women… except the 3 percent who accuse our friends.

Dunham was forced to modify her memoir after a lawsuit threat by a mustachioed Republican whom the book appeared to accuse of raping her. So that 3 percent might even include Lena Dunham.

But now Dunham is back insisting that senators have a “moral imperative to believe and protect survivors” by voting down Kavanaugh. That’s a moral imperative that Dunham doesn’t live by.

The moral imperative of believing women is just as selective on the left as it is in Dunham’s head.

What does #BelieveAllWomen really mean? It doesn’t mean that women don’t lie. Nor does it mean that women don’t lie about sexual assault. The leftists who chant that all women must be believed don’t believe the women who dismissed Ford’s attempt to use them as witnesses. Women in assault cases never lie. Except when their testimony contradicts that of the other women who must be believed.

#BelieveAllWomen invokes a cynically politicized construct of gender solidarity. In 2016, Madeline Albright pitched Hillary Clinton to New Hampshire voters by telling them, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” What she really meant was that there was a special place in hell for women who supported Bernie Sanders, or any other candidates, over Hillary Clinton.

By attacking Brett Kavanaugh, Ford became one of those women who help other women. If by women, you mean a feminist infrastructure that defines helping women as being on the left. Ford’s friend, who refused to support her bizarre story, became one of those women destined for a special place in hell.

A special place in hell with a reel of Hillary Clinton talk show appearances playing for all eternity.

#BelieveAllWomen means that women are to believed, not as a gender, a biological fact that the left decided three years ago no longer exists, but as a political class. Feminism, like all leftist identity politics, pretends to invoke the solidarity of a beleaguered group with unique experiences when it actually reduces all groups, women, racial and ethnic minorities, gays and the poor, to a leftist political class.

When the left talks about black leaders, it doesn’t mean Clarence Thomas, it means leftists. When it talks about women, it doesn’t mean Kellyanne Conway, it means leftists. Every time the left wraps itself in the flag of a race, sex, creed or orientation, it’s really reducing that group to its own political agenda.

The only feminism, black nationalism or other ‘ism’ that it supports is reducible to the left.

The left doesn’t believe all women. It believes the women whose claims match its political interests. Those are the real women. And the women who aren’t on the left shouldn’t be believed.

“Playboy model who goes on Hannity, who voted for Trump,” MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski blathered, going after the first Franken accuser. “In this #MeToo environment, you must always just believe the women. And I think that there’s a lot of reasons why we need to look at the women seriously and believe them… I’m just wondering if all women need to be believed.”

Plenty of other Franken accusers, including a feminist choir member, would emerge.  But Mika, who these days is riding the Ford bandwagon and slamming anyone skeptical of the Kavanaugh accuser, summed up the distinction between the women who need to be believed and those who don’t.

It’s not about credibility. It’s about politics.

Bill Clinton’s accusers were written off as right-wing plants. Like Mika, the Frankentruthers continue spreading conspiracy theories about Franken’s first accuser because of her perceived Republican affiliations. But when partisan othering won’t work, both of Ellison’s accusers were leftist activists who traveled in the same political circles as Ellison, they’re dismissed as unstable or mentally ill.

Nobody believes all women. History and current events are littered with evidence that the left doesn’t.

#BelieveAllWomen is another lefty bait and switch, a double standard posing as a principle, moving goal posts disguised as moral values. Expect the left to use it as a weapon: just don’t imagine it will live by it.

It can’t and won’t.

The left has values and it has tactics. And too many conservatives confuse the two. Identity politics isn’t a value, it’s a tactic. It builds coalitions by seeking out and exploiting grievances, manufacturing alliances of dispossessed groups under leaders whose first allegiance is not to their group, but to the left.

As a matter of tactics, the left would (and does) ally with racists as with minorities, with misogynists as with women, with homophobes, as with gay rights advocates, as long as it advances its goals. It will even do both at the same time. That’s why the left allies with Islamists even as it shouts about feminism.

The left has values that it will sell out in the short term, but not the long term, like a totalitarian state running all areas of life. And it has tactics that it will fight for in the short term, but not the long term.

Feminism is not an end. It’s a means.

Lefties will believe only those women who are the means for advancing its end. And crush the others.

Originally published at FrontPageMag.com at https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271538/nobody-believes-all-women-daniel-greenfield